Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show...(the opening lines of David Copperfield as written by Charles Dickens;inspired by MTM). Or at least this ACCOUNT will, perhaps, have a reflection on whether I'm going to be the hero in my own life.
Saints or sinners, take no prisoners
What's left after you fall? Steve Perry & Journey
This week marks the 65th Anniversary Week of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and V-J Day.
In putting together this essay, I have walked through, and seen on a PBS Special,
some gut-wrenching and provocative material. Please understand this. I love this
Country. There still is no country better than the USA in all of the world. When The
United States stays on that moral high ground, it is exemplary to the point that
many other countries look up to us and attempt to model their affairs and
governmental apparatus as ours.
Regarding our decision to drop two Atomic Bombs to demonstrate our superiority and,
as well, hoping to hasten the end of the War with Imperial Japan, there is now 65 years of hindsight and relative world peace with which to analyze this. Hindsight is always 20/20, and certainly time helps to take the many emotional factors that exist in the-eye-of-the-hurricane, out of the equation.
With death tolls mounting daily---militarily and civilian, the anticipated numbers
were looking to go exponentially off-the-chart, if the War was looking to go into 1946
with a full-scale landing invasion onto the Island Nation of Japan. Richard Frank doggedly details statistics to substantiate this in his book: DOWNFALL.
In early 1945, and this is all graphically detailed in DOWNFALL(which I possess); Richard Frank depicts how the Japanese officials, during the Fire Bombing Raids on the civilian population of Tokyo in March of 1945, dismissed the civilian casualties as heroic samurai warriors giving their lives for the sake of their Homeland and their Divine Emperor.
And Warren Kozak writes in 6 August 2010 Wall Street Journal that:
Since 1945, Japan's narrative has centered almost exclusively on the atomic blasts and its role as victim—with short shrift given to the Japanese invasions of China, Manchuria, Korea, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indochina, Burma, New Guinea and, of course, the attack on Pearl Harbor. Japanese children have learned little about the Rape of Nanking or the fact that as many as 17 million Asians died at the hands of the Japanese in World War II—many in the most brutal ways imaginable.
There is also the inconvenient truth that Japan started the war in the first place. There would have been no war in the Pacific between 1937 and 1945 had Japan stayed home.
Focusing on the atomic bombs paints the Japanese as victims, like other participants in World War II. They were not. The Japanese, like their German allies, were bent on global conquest and the destruction of other people who did not fit their bizarre racial theories. Japan's continued focus on Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been an understandable sore point for its Asian neighbors, who suffered greatly at its hands. ...
Young people today may have a hard time understanding that point because of the moral equivalence and political correctness that have taken over our society, our media and especially our universities. It teaches our children that all countries have good and bad elements within them—something so obvious that it's trite. But this lesson has become so powerful that it is not out of the norm for young people today to believe that, while World War II was certainly horrible, all sides share some blame.
As for the morality of the bombing, it seems clear that the bombs actually ended up saving both American and Japanese lives.
The best treatment of these issues I've read is Downfall by Richard Frank. In it, he reviews in great detail the American plans for the invasion of Japan and the Japanese plans for resisting it. He works through the stark mathematics in a most convincing way, demonstrating the cost in lives that would have resulted from an invasion would have been truly astronomical, especially among the Japanese civilian population. Frank also makes an excellent case that starving Japan out in a campaign of submarine warfare and conventional air warfare was neither politically nor militarily practicable. It is a must read for anyone who wants to really understand what happened in August 1945.
With these perspectives offered as a way to keep this essay somewhat grounded, I would like to provide some of my humanity.
Can you imagine...
Six football-fields above you~~~a literal
Hell, worse than Dante's 14th level, opens
up on you.
I can't even fathom that; wouldn't even want
to come close to knowing that.
Imagine the searing temperature, I'm to
understand, was supposed to be seven times
that of the surface of our Sun.
My prayer would be that if that were something
I would have to bear witness to, that God in his
infinite mercy, would have me and my beloved
evaporate in an instant.
Yet, we know that God is not that merciful.
Victims of the Hiroshima blast, with melted
flesh dangling from their twisted distorted
framing that was once considered a body,
jumped...people threw themselves into the rivers to escape the searing heat and attempt to cool their melted skin, which was hanging off~~~ as an account published in the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum tells it.
I can only imagine that in our infinite wisdom to carry out TWO of the most devastating acts ever done in the history of mankind, and I still agree that this HAD to be done to hasten an end to the War with Imperial Japan, that we must now know that this can NEVER be done again.
I am still of the school of thought that believes if the Hiroshima and Nagasaki Bombings did not take place, the loss of military and civilian lives, once we poured onto the Japanese Island, would have exceeded millions.
In the words of Edwin Starr...war I despise
'Cause it means destruction of innocent lives
War means tears in thousands of mothers' eyes
When their sons go out to fight and lose their lives
I said:
War... Huh... Good God y'all!
What it is good for?
Absolutely nothing!
I must admit that I flat-out cried...with this one segment of the PBS Special
that I was watching during the anniversary week, covering the Hiroshima Atomic Bomb subject matter.
You see, this young girl was putting together her summer-school day lunch, when the blast took place. Her tin-plated lunch-box was found, after the blast, with the
contents therein, were turned to a solid resin-brick-form; hauntingly charcoal blackened.
As the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum describes what was part of her wardrobe...the shirt above belonged to 13-year-old schoolgirl Nobuko Oshita. She was about half a mile away from the hypocentre of the blast. Relief corps workers found her alive and returned her to her parents but she died later that night.
It is the loss of the innocence; the beautiful young and promising and hopeful lives, that just tears at your very core. When I observed that tin-plated lunch-box sitting alone in the display case, I lost it. It was like I saw this a pet puppy 'lost' because it no longer had its owner~~~to care for it.
There is this pocket watch~~~which was being carried by 59-year-old(my age) Kengo Nikawa over a mile away from the hypocentre of the blast. It was given to him by his son and he always carried it with him. On display at the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, it bears witness to the exact time of 08:15AM on 6 August 1945, detonating
at 600 metres, that the United States would effect the most sobering and devastating act of the 20th Century. Kengo suffered major burns to his shoulder, back, and head. He died just over 2 weeks later from his injuries.
In The Eye of The Devastating Hurricane, a decision was made. How it touched Humanity,
sways the Moral Compass~~~to this day.
I will close with this anecdotal perspective that was offered at one point during the Manhattan Project development-days where there really was discussions about the morality of this. America did not conduct the Manhattan Project with benign neglect, or devoid of any sense of a moral compass.
Read closely:
A number of notable individuals and organizations have criticized the bombings, many of them characterizing them as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and/or state terrorism. Two early critics of the bombings were Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who had together spurred the first bomb research in 1939 with a jointly written letter to President Roosevelt.
Szilard, who had gone on to play a major role in the Manhattan Project, argued:
"Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one... bomb, say, on ROCHESTER and the other on BUFFALO, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?"
Know this. My prayer is~~~Never Again.
--{-=@
Hickok
The Promise
PS: This essay was truly a Labor-of-Love
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